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Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then the tools become defence mechanisms... against the unconscious.

Rollo May

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Rollo May
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 21
Died: 1994
Died: October 22
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Writer
Ought
Techniques
Become
Mechanism
Unconscious
Technique
Protection
Mechanisms
Easily
Extension
Tools
Extensions
Consciousness
Defence

More quotes by Rollo May

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It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.
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Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his world.
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Reason works better when emotions are present the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.
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When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.
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The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning heart. Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
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The amazing thing about love is that it is the best way to get to know ourselves.
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Life comes from physical survival but the good life comes from what we care about.
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I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate.
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Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
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Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
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There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.
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It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
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Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own
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People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day.
Rollo May
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Courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
Rollo May
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Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.
Rollo May
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We must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one...is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.
Rollo May
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We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
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There is nobody who totally lacks the courage to change.
Rollo May
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Terrorism and the whole drug scene are vivid examples of the fact that what persons abhor most of all in life is the possibility that they will not matter.
Rollo May